


And The Mountains Rang

by epanistamai



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, MCU compliant, PTSD, steve has feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 17:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6529393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epanistamai/pseuds/epanistamai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Anyways, I decided to do this letter writing thing because I'd feel like a real dope writing entries to myself, what with my eidetic memory and all.  I don't know.  It just feels nicer.  More constructive.  I feel like I'm really talking with you, telling you in real time, like Tony'd say."<br/>Steve writes to Bucky on the twenty-first century.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Mountains Rang

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to get Steve's narrative to bounce between happy 'everything is fine' and despair because of course Steve Rogers would try to hide his pain even in his own personal letters to his dead friend.  
> Hopefully this will go beyond Winter Soldier, we'll see how it goes after CA: Civil War comes out.

Bucky,  
The future's strange. Yeah, I can see you rolling your eyes at me going of course it's weird, you punk, it's the future. But I guess you would be prepared for it more, all the science-fiction books you went through. But I think you'd be really happy to see all the things that you read about in those books coming true. I'll try to tell you more about those later, there's just so many things that happened while I was...out.  
Anyways, I decided to do this letter writing thing because I'd feel like a real dope writing entries to myself, what with my eidetic memory and all. I don't know. It just feels nicer. More constructive. I feel like I'm really talking with you, telling you in real time, like Tony'd say. I bet my therapist would have a lot of say about this tack. But she doesn't have to know everything, it's not like I don't know she and Fury are in cahoots about me. Oh yeah, Fury. Nicolas Fury is my commanding officer now, the head of SHIELD, a large black man with an eye-patch. And get this Bucky, Peggy founded SHIELD out of the SSR after the war. Her and Howard, though I don't doubt that she had to drag and browbeat Howard every step of the way. Isn't that something? I always knew Peg would  
She's stronger than either of us and I think she made more of her life than either of us would have if we made it through. Honest, Buck.  
So my overall command is SHIELD but the group I'm fighting with are called the Avengers. They're a great group, really. There's five others: Clint Barton (the archer), Natasha Romanov (the spy), Thor (the space prince from Asgard what the hell Bucky), Bruce Banner (the large green...Hulk), and Tony Stark (the Iron Man). I think we got off to a rough start, a lot of misunderstandings on all sides. I'll tell you about our first fight together later, when I've had time to process that it actually happened. Lemme tell you though, aliens. All your books are actually true so here's posthumous apology to you for ever doubting you. Also, you read that right. Tony is Howard's kid, but far better than Howard. At least, he's trying. Can you imagine Howard as a father? Actually I bet you'd really love Tony. His mouth's almost as smart as yours. I say almost because I still don't have a handle on all the things he's talking about, but he makes the others laugh so that's good. Not enough laughing going around.  
God, I'm getting maudlin now.  
Anyways, this is just the first letter. There's so much happening that I don't really know how to put it all together. Everything's buzzing in my head but I have to take a bit to sort it out so it comes out coherent.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Buck,  
So I promised that I'd explain to you how the hell I got pulled into, I guess, the modern-day Howling Commandos, but you gotta hear this story first. I swear, it's a doozy.  
So my commanding officer, Fury, has a right hand man called Phil Coulson. At first, I thought he was a mild-mannered assistant, kind of like Annie was for Peggy back at base. It turns out he's a SHIELD agent through and through, in the same class as Natasha and Clint. During the...alien invasion, he was on the ground fighting just as hard and as well as any of us.  
But anyways, he is a huge fanboy (Tony's words, again) for Captain America, he owns original comics and even a replica SHIELD. He even owns all the trading cards specifically of Captain America. Why were there trading cards of only me made? What are they trading between? “Oh gee, I guess I'll trade you pre-serum Steve for post-serum Steve and then we can trade back after a few hours.” Yeah, what a real mess. But it turns out the first few times I met Coulson, he was quiet not because he's doing the spy thing like Natasha or Clint but because he was too star struck. Apparently, when the meetings were over, he'd detail exactly what I did and said during the meeting to Clint and Natasha, since he's their handler. According to Clint, his back even got straighter when he was reciting my lines. I swear I'm blushing writing it now. I can imagine you laughing yourself sick saying something about how it's time I got myself some real fans to admire what you've always seen in me. But that isn't even the funniest part. His first 'meeting' with me was when they pulled me out of the plane I crashed in, defrosting me. Yeah, I crashed a plane a few days after you died, Buck. Don't go thinking it was just for you, it was necessary. Really. You don't need anything more to inflate that ego of yours. And you don't need to be worrying about my choices anymore. I got out of it without a scratch.  
But long story (and scientific explanation) short, the serum kept me in some kind of suspended animation until they revived me. And Coulson was there. He was the one responsible for redressing me, since the uniform I was wearing had to be cut off of me for them to attach the IV and other tubes. Boy, that made his year, apparently. Possibly, his whole life. Just sliding me into the hospital rags for when I woke up. Which, that's a whole different story. Clint was making the ugliest expressions as he was telling me this, probably trying to show what Coulson looked like while he was doing it. I laughed myself sick and even Natasha looked on the right side of a smile.  
I think about it a lot, what I've become. Thinking about it is almost all I do now. It's like Captain America is a different thing, when I put on the uniform I'm putting on a new skin and I can watch myself waving at people and can feel the vibrations when I speak. You're the only one who told me how low my voice got.

 

Have a meeting now because apparently the future is made of endless meetings in between beating the pulp out of aliens.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Bucky,  
I know you're probably dying to know how the fight with the aliens went down. Well, they have a name, firstly, the Chitauri. Secondly, apparently Thor's brother Loki can control them and also is. Well, Thor insists that his brother is good at heart but I'll keep my observations right where they are. Either way, it all started with the Tesseract. You'd think, after I basically died to keep the thing out of corrupt hands, SHIELD would have better memory. Probably the best sign that the age of Peggy's directorship of SHIELD is over. Well Loki's plan with the thing was pretty much like Schmidt's when it came down to the line: taking over everything, killing everyone.  
Except, Loki is also capable of mind control. He took over Barton and made him be his puppet, that's how a lot of the shitstorm got stirred up in the first place. I can imagine you recoiling in horror. Yeah, mind control. I can't imagine what that's like. Barton, I don't know him that well still. But those marks are still on him, I can tell. Even Tony treads carefully around him now.

The first time I really teamed up, I think, was with Tony when we were trying to stop Thor. Yeah, Thor not only defended his brother, he literally stole him out of SHIELD custody because he thought he could be. I don't know. Rehabilitated?  
Maybe he could be. Apparently, both Thor and Loki are thousands of years old, old enough to have drunk with Cleopatra and John and all those other people in history. (I'm trying not to think too hard about what living for thousands of years would even entail.) Another thousand years, maybe Loki would-  
I'm getting off topic. Aliens.  
So Tony and I fought Thor and he finally surrendered and gave Loki up again. Fighting in this century isn't all that different from last, at least there's that. Beating the shit out of each other never changes. Anyways, turns out Thor playing nice was for nothing because Loki still turned tail and sicced the (still mind controlled) Barton onto us while he made his speedy escape. And killed Coulson in the meantime. I only told you the funny stories about him, but he was a good man. He was solid. Maybe I'll trust the rest of them in time, but Coulson was steady from the beginning.  
The whole thing came to a head real quick after that. Tony and I figured out that Loki wanted attention. Wanted global attention. We went to New York City and there was a huge fight, huge on a scale I hadn't know fights could be. Let me tell you, just as I was getting used to technology from this time, they're throwing in alien technology which, I have to admit, looked a hell of a lot cooler.  
Tony might blow a gasket if I told him that. He can't stand knowing that anything technology-related is better than his stuff. In that, he's a lot like Howard.  
But okay, details of the fight.  
There was a lot of flying, on both sides. Bruce, let me tell you, the Hulk earned his name. He's maybe even larger than those HYDRA tanks we ran across, and nigh indestructible. I swear, during the fight, I saw him leap up a whole three stories in order to crush with his bare hands an alien ship the size of a car. I almost got my face taken off gaping at that scene.  
Oh right, Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk. It's more scientific explanations but he's got some Jekyll-Hyde thing where he turns from an average Joe into a massive green...Hulk, if he gets angry.  
I can't imagine what it means to have a temper that hinges on so much.  
Natasha is competent in a way that reminds me of Peggy. She's fast, asks no questions, and does whatever she needs to get the job done. I've always had a soft spot for people like that. Starting with you, I guess.  
I take that back. You asked a whole hell of questions.  
Barton, Barton is good. Once Natasha snapped him out of the brainwashing. He's focused and tough. Fast. He fights like he's trying to prove something, which. I understand. I wanted to tell him that there was nothing to prove.  
Just like I wanted to say that to Peg and Morita and Gabe. And you, after Azzano.  
In the end, the breach was sealed by Tony. He came close to death, the Hulk saved him by catching him when he was in free fall.  
Oh! I almost forgot, god. Stark, he fights in literally a robot suit. I shit you not. It's something else. As opulent as I'd expect from any Stark but it's something to see, in combat. He's got a whole battalion of robots and his personal assistant, at this point, is an AI, an Artificial Intelligence. He calls it Jarvis and it can actually think and reply on it's own. I think I've even heard the thing sassing back at Stark. Can you believe it? Like all those science fiction stories. God, you'd get along so well with Tony, asking him about everything, trying to soak up everything the way I can't really bring myself to. The future is really for you. But anyways, that's why he's called Iron Man.  
In the end, we won. Loki was taken custody of by Thor again, but this time in a prisoner way. It's probably for the best, I have no idea how any human court would try someone like Loki but perhaps his home world, Asguard, will pass down the judgment necessary.

Sorry this still ended up so choppy.

After the battle, Fury gave Coulson's trading cards to me. Apparently, there's a lot more variety to those things than I thought.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Hey,  
So I guess I'll finally get to telling you about how I got roped into the Avengers project in the first place. After I was defrosted, they put me into a hospital room that they mocked up to be like something from the 40s. Some stupid plan about easing me in or something, like I'm delicate and need to be eased into losing everything. Sorry.  
Anyways, they make a huge mess of it and I caught on,bust out of the room, the building, and smack into Times Square, thinking it was all HYDRA. Only, it isn't anything like the Square we knew. For one thing, I hadn't seen that many people since. I don't even know. And there were huge billboards everywhere with giant panels of light illuminating everything and all I could think was what are they doing wasting all this during the war and how advanced is HYDRA and that's when I met Fury. He came up on my six. I guess I'm doomed to have everyone get the drop on me now, you  
He explained everything to me. Seventy years I'd missed out on Bucky. It's funny what comes to your mind when you get news like that. I saw myself say that I had a date all the while staring at those flashing lights and all those advertisements, selling everything and nothing. I guess the fight went out of me for a bit because next thing I knew, I was sitting in an empty room with Fury and Coulson and Fury telling me how they found me. Wonders upon wonders, it was Stark again, or a Stark Industries search team. Tony, this time. Apparently, he picked the mantle up from Howard, some bizarre inverse of family heirloom traditions. Yeah, yeah, you'd laugh again. Steve Rogers, on par with the family silver set.  
They kept me in a training barracks of some sort, gave me a bunch of history books so I'd catch up on what's happened. Let me tell you, in a way, I'm glad I wasn't there for those years. Cowardly, I know.  
But it makes me sick, what America has done, did. While I wasn't here. I'm still working through the books but it fills me with dread.

We never really knew what happened during the war. Too busy fighting HYDRA and the Red Skull, our separate missions that we lost track of the larger battle. But I can tell you, selfishly, I'm glad we never had to storm a concentration camp, in that I'm glad you never had to see what happened there. To be honest, I don't think any of us really understood what Hitler was after. Too wrapped up in HYDRA's world domination plans to really look at Hitler himself.

Extermination. That was his plan. Killing all the Jews and everyone else who got in the way. I shake just thinking about you, being born in the wrong country.

Doesn't matter, still got you.

Sitting here writing about it. I can't tell if it's making me more maudlin or whether it's always been there.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Buck,  
I think about Erskine's eyes when I looked him full on and told him I didn't like bullies, all ninety-six pounds of me. God, I thought then that he looked proud of me. I think, now, what he was feeling was sadness, immeasurable grief. For what he thought I'd soon be seeing. What he had fled from.

They have a word for that now. Genocide. A new word created to contain all that we're capable of.

“I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution.” I think St. Augustine wrote it. Had he ever imagined something like this? Did he imagine Night?  
I read those books, autobiographies of survivors of those camps. I can't read more than a few pages before I have to put the book down, to put the image of your face out of my mind. Is this a show of the selfishness of my humanity? The baseness of my nature. My love for the material, your bright and clean face, superseding my required love for humanity. Replacing one man's anguished narrative with the imagined narrative of another.

You knew far before I did, the all-consuming face of evil. How could you not, being in the bowels of HYDRA, Azzano. I never asked you to tell me what happened. Not because I didn't care but because I didn't want you to tell me before you were ready. You took what really happened there to the grave with you and I don't know whether my choice was the right one. Bucky, know that if you didn't want to tell me because you thought you would unnecessarily burden me, nothing you could do would make you a burden to me.  
God, look at me trying to make weak apologies to a long dead man.

I think I can only apologize to you because in a way, I still cannot grasp evil the way you and Erskine could. Some inner part of me still recoils when I think of not just the Holocaust, but the all the genocides that happened after it. Before it.  
Begging for your forgiveness seems to be the easiest way to begin acknowledging this.

What people will do when they no longer think of each other as human.

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

I dream about you most nights. They're different scenarios: you falling, you being killed in front of me, me killing you, you dead on that table at Azzano. Every variation. I remember your face when you fell, eyes so wide and blank. I've seen that expression too many times now, on people who know their number's up but haven't quite grasped that it's over. I hope my face looking down at you, despairing, is the last thing you ever saw. Not for anything but the fact that I hope the last thing you saw was someone who loves you because the other side is that you died looking at the vastness of the gorge you fell into and that means you died looking loneliness in the face.

I hope you died knowing you took me with you.

 

 


End file.
